It’s grim. Why would I subject anybody to this gruesome story?Nobody would want to read it. I mean, I’d want to read it. I wouldn’t enjoy it, though.

(Ed. note: In 2011, I was asked by a friend to participate in a storytelling show for a Jewish cultural organization. The theme was “escape.” Here’s a transcription of the notes I took while trying to come up with an “escape” story.)

When I heard last spring that Darin Strauss was coming out with a novel about Munchausen’s by Proxy, a syndrome whereby caregivers cause or feign illness in their charges in order to get attention for themselves, I didn’t know whether to be threatened or overjoyed.

I had what I thought was a meeting, which turned out to be a “social lunch,” and I was freaking out the whole time because talking without an agenda with strangers is precarious.

Alyssa Greenberger was a strange case. As first she was just risible, sending dippy notes to my boyfriend Misha in the History class they shared – she was hungry, said one of the notes Misha showed me. She wanted pizza.

On the day after Thanksgiving, 2012, I picked up the phone and learned that my mom had died.

Bereaved daughter of the spectacularly deranged.

I met Don at Payday, back when it was at the Ukranian Home on Second Avenue.

I don’t know how long we’d been tripping for by that point. Hours and hours and hours, light ones and dark ones, and some surprisingly cold ones, for late spring; then again, it was night.